Friday, February 14, 2014

A map of the universe

If you'd be asked to tell what a map of the universe looks like, I'm pretty sure you'd imagine something on a dark background, with many dots representing planets, and shaded areas corresponding to galaxies. That map of the universe, drawn by Gabriel Conant, a graduate student at Berkeley, is of more or less like that. Except that dots are mathematical theories, and galaxies correspond to some stability properties defined in model theory.

Here theories have esoteric nicknames, such as ACF, ACVF, SCF$_p^n$, or ``universal graph omitting a bowtie'' (an homage to Tom S. ? :-)), and properties have even more esoteric nicknames — NIP, o-minimal, NSOP$_{n+1}$, or superstable. To make it something more than an enjoyable invitation au voyage, Gabriel indicated important specific examples, with their definitions and references.

By the way, this is also a beautiful illustration of the power of HTML5.